'all the flakes of me fell not like snow but like ash and they drifted through the breeze like stones'
Isra watches his expression play out like the rotations of a moon. A crescent of his brow rises across the dark sweep of his face. A full moon of disbelief and a very devilish sort of harshness spreads out like a long, dark shadow across the horizon of his smile. He's a story of the night, of changes. His is a darkness that rises and rises again just so the stars have a place to glitter and shine in to tell stories to those brave enough to draw lines between the specks of light.
And as she watches him she wonders that she no longer trembles to see the cruelty in his skin that looks like blood under a golden sun. She wonders that he seems no more than a knight, dressed in black and blood and iron but still a knight.
Oh, how the mountains and the dead changed her that night!
“Ours.” She corrects him, smiling a look that she takes from a story living in her soul. It's the look of a queen and a dreamer, edged in ivory teeth sharp enough to cut. It feels like false fire against her lips but she lets it burn and burn instead of smolder. “Our enemies paint the loam with blood. Our jailers are gone and their 'fear' with it. Our world has broken.” Isra wonders at this fire, wonders that she feels as if another tidal wave lives and crests and crashes against her bone and pushes her on and on and on over the mountains risen from the ground with the harshness of his look.
She steps closer and her horn flashes like a sword made of steel and silk and wishes in the soft-light. Isra is a tangle of things, a hundred different stories. But none settle over her skin quite right, nothing fits the dark and stained and living soul inside this lie of flesh she wears. “This is your story as much as it is mine.” That voice doesn't sound quite right, it's a character's voice more than a book's voice of ink and pages thin enough to tear and burn like kindling.
Isra takes that voice anyway. She makes it her own even though it feels like salt and sun and nothing like a moon on her tongue.
“And your story is no more finished than mine is.” Behind them that banner still waves in the winter wind, heavy now with frost and enough blood that she thinks all the waters in the sea could not wash it clean. Perhaps nothing will ever wash Denocte clean, nothing will wash away the stains and the silt and the sin.
But they could try.
“You will be my Regent.” It's not a question as much as it's a whisper of her horn through the cold air (a touch of stardust that dares to brave the day). Isra's afraid to make the words a question, to show anything but strength and this new false fury of fire to demand that he never leave.
Every story needs a devil just as much as every story needs a hero.
@Raymond
